3D-Printed Fingerprints Produce Better Biometrics

The dummy fingers will be helpful in the development of up-and-coming touchless fingerprint sensing technologies.

Michigan State University, NIST

Gallery

ArtistsDiscover3-DPrinting

View Caption+

In the consumer and tech markets, 3-D printing is used to build cars, robots, footwear, rockets, gun and just about anything else you can imagine. But in the world of art, visual artists are just beginning to explore the creative ways to use 3-D printers to expand their work. A painter’s canvas, one dimensional until now, suddenly can show depth and perspective, while a sculptor’s own laser-scanned body can become the working model for 3-D printed works.
Reclining Figure by Sophie Kahn
Way back in 2003, while studying at a university in Melbourne, Sophie Kahn observed a group of architects using 3-D scanning and printing. “I started using the scanner on my own body in the lab, and to me it was very reminiscent of art history and classical sculpture and indicative of the fragmentation and decay of ancient art,” Kahn said. “So I am interested in the melding of ancient and futuristic art.”
Here, she combines 3-D laser scanning and 3-D printing with ancient bronze casting techniques to achieve a timeless, deconstructed look.

Sophie Kahn

View Caption+#2: Laura

Kahn says she purposefully uses a 3-D model in a way that will generate errors and glitches in the final printing process.
“I use motion of the body because the scanner does not handle a moving breathing body very well. It misunderstands that, so you get multiple overlapping figures,” she said. “I sculpt that, and it’s very labor intensive. I spend a couple of months on each piece, using digital sculpting software. When I’m happy with it, I send it out to the printer."
Kahn’s work can be seen at sophiekahn.net, and in an upcoming exhibit at Connecticut College, Oct. 28 to Dec. 6, 2013.

Sophie Kahn

View Caption+#3: Protocolonization of Commons

Artist Shane Hope sits at the intersection of science and technology via molecular nanotechnology, the science of modifying objects at the atomic or molecular level. “My goal is to glean abnormalities that aesthetically accentuate messy molecular modeling,” he said. “I've hand-hobbled together a bunch of bots (3-D printers) from scratch and I employ them more like painting assistants.”

Shane Hope

View Caption+#4: Nano-Nonobjective Noo-Zoos

Hope, whose work will be shown Oct. 18 to Feb. 2, 2014 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “Dissident Futures” exhibition, was trained as a painter. Although he has no formal computer science training, he uses open-source nano molecular design software to create his complex designs and uses several 3-D printers in his studio. Each piece uses thousands of 3D-printed models.

Shane Hope

View Caption+#5: Echoviren

In the heart of a 150-acre redwood forest, architect Bryan Allen and art practice psychologist Stephanie Smith installed Echoviren, a 10x10x8-foot, 3D-printed translucent enclosure. “We used seven printers running 24 hours a day producing essentially 500 individual pieces,” Allen told DNews. “We used run-of-the-mill 3-D desktop printers. The 3-D printer compresses the time from conception of an idea to its fruition and building. You use the same tool to evaluate your design, to produce prototypes and to produce the final design.”
The artists’ goal was to create a space in the forest influenced by the environment and coastal redwoods.
“For us, it really democratizes the production of large scale work,” Allen said. The project will decompose naturally within 40 to 50 years.

Smith-Allen Studio

View Caption+#6: K162

Frank Stella can safely be called a pioneer in the use of 3-D printing for art, since he first started experimenting with it in the mid 1990s. Stella gained fame in the 1950s with geometrics in nature paintings.
Stella starts with a handmade model, sometimes made from paper, which he scans and captures as a digital image. He then cuts and pastes from other existing models before manipulating and refining the image and sending to a 3-D printer.

Frank Stella

View Caption+#7: K179

Stella, whose work will be shown at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City from Oct. 16 to July 6, 2014, sometimes adds elements of wire or steel tubing for more texture and depth.
“Stella sees the 3D-printed form as a canvas for him to apply paint,” said Ron Labaco, curator at the Museum of Arts and Design. “The works range from tabletop, about two and a half feet across, to larger free-standing or wall hangings that are as large as six or eight feet across. He works with some of the 3-D printing companies in Europe that have the largest printers.”

Frank Stella

View Caption+#8: Dogma 1

Fans who were surprised at the intricate artwork on Kanye West’s 2012 album, “Cruel Summer” can thank Parisian artist Hugo Arcier. Arcier, trained in digital filmmaking and 3-D graphic arts, creates original objects using 3-D printers.
“Using 3-D printers probably blurs the line between art and design and some projects I do with 3D-printing technology can be considered more as design,” Arcier told DNews. “I’m excited about the link between art and science.”

Hugo Arcier

View Caption+#9: Dogma 2

Arcier, whose work will be on display at Show Off, the annual Paris art fair, form Oct. 21-23, says artists have a long history of incorporating technology into their work. He points to Andy Warhol’s use of screen printing as an example.
“3-D printing is a technology that evolves very quickly so I am paying close attention to it,” Arcier said. “There are more and more materials available. I am doing some tests now with rubber material. I think it can be used very creatively. I also look forward to the possibility of printing bigger objects, since the size is really a limitation now."

To test the accuracy of a new fingerprint scanner, researchers typically run millions of known fingerprint images through the system's matching software. But this testing procedure can't quite mimic real operating conditions, as a 2-D image fed into a program is fundamentally different than a 3-D finger pressed to a sensor.

To get around that problem, researchers at Michigan State University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have come up with the first 3D-printed fingerprint.

Say hello to 3D printing in your home! The Cube provides consumers with endless possibilities, watch Anthony talk with 3D Systems to get all the details, and how you can get your hands on one!

DCL

A new technical paper describes their system for projecting 2-D images onto a generic 3-D finger surface, then fabricating the realistic 3-D fingerprint, with all its loops and swirls, in a commercial 3-D printer.

This could be useful for end-to-end evaluations of fingerprint matching systems, which start with fingerprint image acquisition and then go on to feature extraction and matching. In the video below, MSU professor Anil Jain says the use of such 3-D fingerprints could help both sensor manufacturers and algorithm developers improve the hardware and software of fingerprint matching systems.

The dummy fingers will also be helpful in the development of up-and-coming touchless fingerprint sensing technologies.

Fingerprints are recorded at many nations' border crossings. And the iPhone 5s can be unlocked with Touch ID, a fingerprint recognition system. So long as our fingerprints are going to be scanned everywhere, we can at least root for those scanners to be as accurate as possible.

Fingerprint biometrics are finding more and more applications in our speedy and security-conscious world; the uses go far beyond law enforcement. In India, the government is trying to enroll every citizen in abiometric ID system using fingerprints and iris scans.